Note: this is an excerpt from my forthcoming book Make them Care! In a recent post (Why you should bury the sign up button) I told the story of a redesign I did in which people just didn’t want to click the “sign up” button on the home page, no matter how beautiful or sexy [...]

Continue Reading: Designing for the Next Step

A couple weeks ago I published Why You Should Bury your Sign Up Button and got some really interesting feedback and comments from folks. One of the more interesting bits was a follow-up post by the folks at Zurb who had experienced the exact same phenomenon…when they took away the “sign up” button and instead [...]

Continue Reading: More on Burying the Sign Up Button

A short while ago I was involved in a project redesigning a home page of a website. I dutifully designed the page in the common fashion, using a bold headline, some bullet points, and a juicy call-to-action button. It was very similar to many of the startup home pages that you might run across every [...]

Continue Reading: Why you Should Bury your Sign Up Button

Often when I’m designing I try to imagine a screen interaction as a face-to-face dialog between two people. Specifically, I try to imagine that the person visiting or using the screen is trying to have a conversation with a person representing the website or software the screen is part of. Of course, real-life conversation is [...]

Continue Reading: What our home pages are really saying (a dialog)

At the very least, interfaces should not lie. They should not deceive the people who use them into thinking something is true when it actually isn’t. Apparently, Facebook does not agree. On Sunday Nic Cubrilovic posted some troubling news: Logging out of Facebook is not Enough. Facebook doesn’t actually log you out when you ask [...]

Continue Reading: Redesigned: Facebook Logout Button

One of the biggest challenges in designing and building web applications is to find and keep focus: to only build what is necessary and to leave out the rest. So when a company keeps a really tight focus on their core product they should be applauded. Instagram is one of those companies. If you’re not [...]

Continue Reading: How Instagram Stays in Focus

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings wrote a blog post yesterday explaining his company’s recent decision to split up the streaming and DVD delivery services of the company. An Explanation and Some Reflections The DVD delivery service (the original service) will now be called Qwikster. Yes, that’s right, Qwikster. The streaming part of the service will continued [...]

Continue Reading: Netflix in Danger of Ruining their User Experience

There is a lot to like in the presentation The Language of Interfaces by Des Traynor, in which he makes several important points about Interface Design. The first is that words mean everything in the interface. Every single word you choose is important, from the call-to-action button to the headline to the words in an [...]

Continue Reading: Interface Design is Copywriting

The Google+ launch has been very positive for Google so far. I think it’s interesting from a UI standpoint for several reasons: 1. Andy Hertzfeld is lead Designer. This surprised a lot of people. Andy Hertzfeld is one of the original Apple Macintosh team members and is the lead designer of Google+, focusing on the [...]

Continue Reading: 5 Reasons why Google+ is interesting UI.

The fastest way to improve your interface is to improve your copy-writing.

Continue Reading: Writing Microcopy